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"The Condemned" won't be able to buy a good review anywhere, and no defender of it could mount a case for its being anything much -- besides being ridiculous. Yet there's a place for this kind of movie, with its flashy premise, big action and its charismatic wrestler in the lead role. The picture was created to do three things: to appall, to thrill and to provide its oversize hero with enough pre-homicide wisecracks to maintain audience interest: "Sounds like you had a hard life. Good thing it's over."

Point being, before we completely dismiss "The Condemned," we should note one thing. There's "Grindhouse," containing two features in which directors Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino satirize, exalt and take inspiration from B-movies and low budget action films. And then there's "The Condemned," the real thing. "The Condemned" isn't post-modern junk, smirky junk, faux junk or clever junk. It's pure junk, with a certain integrity to it.

Taken for what it is -- genuine grindhouse fodder, a movie with roots in the B-movie tradition -- the picture has some distinct gut-level pleasures. Ten hardened murderers, all awaiting execution in the hellhole prisons of the world, are taken to a remote island near New Guinea and given one instruction: Kill each other. In the end, only one survivor will make it off the island with the grand prize -- freedom and an unspecified large sum of money. The mastermind of this diabolical scheme is a reality TV producer named Breckel, who is played by Robert Mammone, an Australian actor who, for some reason, adopts an American accent here. No, this role called for a British accent.

Anyway, Breckel is heartless, duplicitous and greedy. He has rigged the island with cameras and is selling his reality-death marathon as a live stream over the Internet for $50 per customer. Obviously, he is the future of entertainment. Among the prisoners is an American, played by wrestler Steve Austin, who will never win an Oscar but has one distinct advantage as a screen entity -- he looks like the biggest, toughest man alive. He's a bald mountain of muscle. He looks like, if you punched him, you'd break your hand. Austin plays a retired Special Forces soldier who somehow ended up in a Latin American prison, but he doesn't tell anybody about his military past. Instead, when asked about himself, he says, "I'm an interior decorator." Only people who think that's a funny line should consider seeing "The Condemned."

For the record, I think that's funny, but even funnier is writer-director Scott Wiper's attempt to position his film as a critique of violence in entertainment. The villainous producer is shown making all the usual cases for violence onscreen: People enjoy it. It's not aimed at kids. It serves as a release and not an incitement. But the producer is proven to be a selfish monster. His island experiment results in rape, torture and murder. At one point, a murderer/contestant comes upon a geek who has been watching the slaughter onscreen. "You enjoy watching all this?" he asks incredulously.

Yet at the same time "The Condemned" trades on precisely the screen violence it criticizes. You have to love an anti-violence movie that has as its slogan, "10 people will fight. 9 people will die. You get to watch." Hypocrisy in and of itself isn't amusing, but when it's on this grand a scale it becomes hilarious.

-- Advisory: Strong language and nonstop violence.

To hear Mick LaSalle talk about movies, listen to his weekly podcast at sfgate.com/podcasts.